


keep your proud head from falling

by consumptive_sphinx



Series: that i should rise and you should not [3]
Category: Arthurian Mythology
Genre: Angst, Codependence, Fate & Destiny, Feelings and opinions about chivalry, Feelings and opinions about fate, Feelings and opinions about religion, M/M, Other, Sharing a Bed, Suicidal Ideation, Treason
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-22
Updated: 2020-06-22
Packaged: 2021-03-03 23:41:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,772
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24863977
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/consumptive_sphinx/pseuds/consumptive_sphinx
Summary: Mordred talks in his sleep, indistinct murmurs with the occasional half-slurred word; Agravaine has learned to sleep through it. By now the sound is nearly as much of a comfort as holding him, as being able to feel his heartbeat and the rise and fall of his chest as he breathes, another form of certain knowledge that nothing has happened to either of them, and Mordred, in turn, settles into embraces Gareth once called crushing and calls them grounding.Mordred gasps and goes, abruptly, very tense, and then he relaxes and his eyes open and he lets out the breath. “Did I wake you? I’m sorry.”“I was awake already, don’t be.” A few seconds of silence. “Dreaming about drowning again?”--Or: Mordred and Agravaine mourn loved ones dead, and cope, and fail to cope.
Relationships: Agravaine & Mordred (Arthurian), Galahad/Mordred (Arthurian)
Series: that i should rise and you should not [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1890229
Comments: 3
Kudos: 22





	keep your proud head from falling

“I hate it here,” Mordred says, and closes the balcony door behind him, startling Agravaine out of his thoughts. Knowing Mordred that was probably the intent; either way, it’s certainly welcome. “I hated living here and I don't want to be here and I shouldn't have come.”

The castle courtyard stretches below them and the air is thick with mist. Agravaine is perhaps a good poke or two away from crying, or laughing hysterically, or both at once. “Is Camelot truly that much better?”

Mordred shrugs, graceful and choreographed. “It has more people.”

“More people who hate us.”

“More people who hate you, they’ve never made up their minds how to feel about me.” (Agravaine would like to object to this but unfortunately it’s true.) “And they move on to the next distraction quicker there.”

Agravaine can’t contest the truth of that either. No castle is ever truly quiet, but Orkney has been near-eerily still in the days since its queen was killed, and Mordred has that strange choreographed tinge to every movement he makes. Another way in which he takes after their mother, as if he needed any more; he already has her pointed face, her sea-grey eyes, her narrow shoulders and her sharp bones, her dark wavy hair that he wears long like she did.

And he is breathing, _they_ are breathing, and she is not.

“I’m not sure I want to move on to the next distraction.” He was trying to sound sharp but he mostly sounds on-edge; it’s hard to sound properly angry with Mordred the way he does with everybody else.

Mordred takes a minute or so to respond. Agravaine — doesn’t look at him, doesn’t want to have to take whatever his face might be doing into account, Mordred has so much body language that it’s exhausting even at the best of times and Agravaine is already so tired of emotions.

“I’m sorry,” Mordred says quietly; his fingers _taptaptap_ against the railing. “I know she was different to you. I don’t know how to — interact? With the fact that she was different to you? But I know she was and I’m sorry I can’t feel the way about it that would help.”

Right. Of course. Agravaine refuses to feel guilty about mourning but he can’t help a twinge of _oh God did I really say that_ about telling his brother who came to Camelot flinching at small noises to be less callous about Morgause. “It’s not you I’m angry at.”

“I know. I’m sorry anyway.” There’s another uncomfortably long silence _(taptaptaptaptap_ go Mordred’s fingertips) before he says “You can rage to me about it, if you want to.”

Can he?

“...I’m not sure I do want to,” he says, instead of asking that. “What I _want_ is to kill Lamorak, and to scream at Gaheris.” And isn’t it something, that Gaheris cut their mother’s head from her shoulders and let Lamorak leave unharmed, that the most chivalrous of the three of them killed a woman in her bed and refused to hurt the person in the room who could actually have fought him — isn’t it something, how it would have been treachery to kill the person Gaheris has no quarrel with, but somehow it was perfectly justified to murder the person he wanted to hurt anyway; isn’t it something how often chivalry works like that — and isn’t it something how they still call Agravaine the villain?

He does finally look at Mordred. Mordred is smiling; it doesn’t reach his eyes. “I’ll help with whatever parts of that I can.”

“So, the murder.”

“So the murder,” Mordred agrees, and reaches out to take Agravaine’s hand.

\--

There is, of course, no grave, for there would have been nothing to bury in it. Galahad ascended to heaven, or so says Percival, leaving no body behind, and nothing was brought back of him but a shield emblazoned with a red cross.

Mordred would at least consider sitting at a grave if there was one, although if he’s being truthful he would probably decide against any show of feeling so public, but there isn’t even a decision to make. As it is, he sits not in his own window but in Agravaine’s, pulls his knees against his chest and clasps his arms around them like he used to when he was a child and curling up small was a strength rather than a weakness, was armor rather than a chink in it. If Agravaine looks for him he’ll find him easily enough, and even if he doesn’t look, here Mordred is.

“Ah,” Agravaine says from behind him, almost as soon as he has the thought. “Are you —”

“I tried to convince him not to,” Mordred says before Agravaine has a chance to finish asking if he’s alright, because if he has to answer that question he’s sure he’s going to shatter. “I _told him_ the Grail wasn’t worth this, that it wouldn’t save Camelot, and that Camelot had no right to expect him to save it.”

Agravaine didn’t ask and more than likely has no idea what to say to that — he’s good at anger but he’s never been any good at grief, his own or others’ — but he sits down in the window in the space next to Mordred, and Mordred unfurls just enough to lean on him, does his best to say _Thank you, thank you for being here, thank you for being with me, thank you that I am not alone right now_ without words.

“He didn’t even want to,” Mordred continues rather than trying to say any of that out loud, after it’s been silent for long enough that he’s sure Agravaine won’t say anything. “Or, I don’t know, maybe he did want to, I don’t think _he_ knew, he certainly never had the chance to ask himself. He said it was all he was alive for. And he chose it anyway.” And if God and Arthur and Camelot and fate itself had no right to push him into that choice, Mordred had still less to stop him. “It’s stupid, really, I knew when he left that he wasn’t going to come back, it’s just —” and his voice breaks. “I don’t know. It shouldn’t be different hearing what I already knew.”

“I think it usually is? Different, I mean.”

This is the other reason Mordred is glad he’s here, and not outside where a grave might be if there were one: Agravaine would never sound so uncertain, if others could hear. This hesitance is for Mordred and Mordred alone to bear witness to.

“Yes, well,” and he almost smiles, although it isn’t funny. “I doubt I’m going to be able to sleep for a while.” Galahad had told him once that he dreamt nearly every night of drowning; Mordred’s nightmares are, he thinks, of a different origin, but there are only so many ways to flavor the feeling of water filling up your lungs.

“You can stay,” Agravaine tells him, without pausing to consider. Maybe they both need this, Lord knows they’ve had precious few warm nights since Gaheris — Mordred doesn’t go down that path. Not now.

“I wasn’t actually asking, but thank you,” Mordred says, although he absolutely was, and he leans on Agravaine’s side a little harder, pushes his face into Agravaine’s shoulder. The window sucks the heat from the room, and Mordred’s hands are usually cold anyway, but Agravaine is solid and Agravaine is warm and Mordred can maybe be warmed by him if he just presses close enough. Maybe.

\--

Mordred talks in his sleep, indistinct murmurs with the occasional half-slurred word; Agravaine has learned to sleep through it. By now the sound is nearly as much of a comfort as holding him, as being able to feel his heartbeat and the rise and fall of his chest as he breathes, another form of certain knowledge that nothing has happened to either of them, and Mordred, in turn, settles into embraces Gareth once called crushing and calls them grounding.

Mordred gasps and goes, abruptly, very tense, and then he relaxes and his eyes open and he lets out the breath. “Did I wake you? I’m sorry.”

“I was awake already, don’t be.” A few seconds of silence. “Dreaming about drowning again?”

“Dreaming about drowning again.” Mordred is never still when he’s awake; Agravaine hears the movement of skin against cloth as much as he feels it.

There’s a long silence; Mordred might have fallen asleep again, if it weren’t for the scratch of calloused fingertips on wool, for the uneven way he breathes. 

“I’ve been thinking about prophecies,” Mordred says, after several minutes. “I’ve known what I was going to wind up choosing since before I knew what it meant, our mother made sure of that, but I don’t want to die having never even asked whether it was what I wanted.”

“Implying that even if it wasn’t you would choose it anyway,” he observes.

“Mm.” Taptaptap. “I’ve _seen_ people try to fight prophecies. Our Good King tried to fight his, and all he really did was make me the sort of person who’d fulfill it. And —” _taptaptap_ — “there’s a difference, I think, between being dragged onto a battlefield kicking and screaming, and walking onto it yourself on your own feet and of your own choice. Galahad understood that.”

Agravaine considers and rejects a dozen responses, all of which boil down to ‘walking proudly to your death is still death.’ It’s not like Mordred doesn’t know that, or like he isn’t thinking of it already. “So what is it that you want,” he says instead, that being the question Mordred is most likely to have an answer to.

“What I _want_ is justice for Sodom and Gomorrah and the firstborn sons of Egypt, every sinner freed from Hell, and to tear down Heaven and build a better world in its place.” His voice is perfectly steady. If there were any light in the room, Agravaine is sure Mordred’s eyes would be gleaming with it. “What I can _have,_ though, is vengeance against Camelot for everyone they ever left to die for their salvation. And I do intend to take it.”

Agravaine cradles his precious bright-burning little brother, buries his face in his hair. _You’re going to die. This is going to kill you,_ he thinks, and, slightly more shamefully, _at least you actually want the thing you’ve chosen._

“You know I’ll be behind you,” he says, instead of any of that. If Morgause and Arthur and Camelot and God had no right to push Mordred into this choice, Agravaine has even less to stop him.

**Author's Note:**

>  _I'm in misery, but you can see, as old as your omens  
>  And the mother we share will never **keep your proud head from falling;**  
>  The way is long but you can make it easy on me,  
> And the mother we share will never keep our cold hearts from calling._  
> (The Mother We Share, CHVRCHES)


End file.
